Simon Hoyle has been a finance journalist for more than 25 years – a finance journalist because the football and motorsports rounds at The Age were filled when he was awarded a cadetship. He worked on BRW and Personal Investment magazines, and was part of the team that launched Money Management. Hoyle spent 11 years at the Australian Financial Review before moving on to be an investment writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian. He was appointed editor of Professional Planner in November 2007.

Glenn Freeman is a senior journalist for Professional Planner. He has around three years’ experience in financial services journalism, having also covered broader areas of business including M&A activity and energy. His journalistic experience includes five years spent abroad, where he was editor of an oil and gas title in the United Arab Emirates along with other in-house and freelance projects, which included stints in motorcycle and automotive journalism.

A forum for the grand ideas and the fine details

Prominent legislators, regulators and superannuation analysts have been given free rein to share big ideas about how the industry needs to change to support self-funded retirees, the head of the SMSF Association says.

John Maroney, chief executive of the SMSF Association, says the future of super will be the overriding theme of this year’s conference, with plenaries and break-out sessions to tease out both how the industry must reform itself and how it is already equipped to help trustees achieve their retirement objectives.

Education, for both professionals and consumers, will be a topic in several forums, including the opening breakfast, which will broach how advisers, accountants and auditors can keep their skills up to date to meet the evolving needs of their clients.

“There will be a lot of focus on recent changes to super and how they are being implemented,” Maroney says. “A lot of people will have developed strategies in the last five years that will need to be revisited.”

Professional standards and voluntary education are also going to be agenda points.

“A lot of work is being done about lifting standards and how that plays out will be a key area of interest,” he says.

On Day 2, Deen Sanders, chief executive of the Financial Adviser Standards and Ethics Authority, will take the floor to outline the future requirements for advisers.

Also on Day 2, Peter Kell, deputy chairman of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Robert Jeremenko, head of Treasury’s retirement income policy division, and James O’Halloran, the Australian Taxation Office’s deputy commissioner of superannuation, will join Maroney to discuss the future of superannuation regulation.

As usual, superannuation policy will also be a hot topic over the three days, with a mix of both policy distillation and agitation for change in certain areas.

“We still think there’s a lot more work to be done to smooth out these retirement black holes, where people are earning more in super but not being able to take that in retirement income,” Maroney says.